Over the weekend, SEO consultant Rob Ousbey opened up Google and was surprised to find that the search engine no longer required him to hit the “enter” key – it simply searched as he typed.
The feature, which Google confirmed it is testing on a select number of users, goes one big step beyond Google Suggest and provides streaming search results as you type.
As you can see in the video below, the feature not only provides search results, but also advertising using Google AdWords. According to Google-centric blog Google Operating System, similar functionality is already in place in Google Alerts, which changes its preview results as you type.
Take a look at Ousbey’s video to see one possible future for Google Search:
While the feature certainly looks nifty, we have to wonder if it would just turn out more annoying than anything else. And an even bigger question would be, how does this work for advertisers? Is an impression still an impression of it only lasts for a half of a second between letters?
Google has gone increasingly real-time recently. In February, Google Reader began showing real-time feeds using PubSubHubbub, and then in March, the company began developing a new feature that would allows publishers big and small to push content to the search engine’s index in real time. And while we want our search results to include real-time information, do we want the search results themselves to come in real time?
What do you think – would you use Google’s streaming search results or would you stick with deciding on a full search term and hitting go before seeing the results?
